DAVE NEESE: The global-warming inquisition

Smoke is emitted from chimneys of a cement plant in Binzhou city, in eastern China’s Shandong province on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013. China, the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide, is directly feeling the man-made heat of global warming, scientists conclude in the first study to link the burning of fossil fuels to one country’s rise in its daily temperature spikes. The study appeared online in late March 2013 in the peer reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The Associated Press

Let’s have a show of hands here. How many of you believe that the radius of a proton is a trillionth the width of a poppy seed — i.e., 0.88 fentometers?

No long ago, if you wanted to be counted among those in the know, among the sophisticated, among the scientifically hip, you’d have had to raise your hand and wave it frantically to indicate an enthusiastic yes.

This would have saved you from being scorned as a mouth-breathing, Bible-thumping, snake-handling, talking-in-tongues, fundamentalist flat-earther. Or a Republican.

But now the once-certain measurement of a proton’s radius is very much in doubt. New measurements are coming up with significantly different figures. Scientists are scratching their heads.

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New doubts also have suddenly arisen over the once-certain knowledge of how and why protons spin the way they do.

Keep in mind that this new uncertainty involves a basic building block of the universe. Protons — a key component of the nuclei of atoms — are thought to have come into existence within a millisecond of the Big Bang.

Complicating matters even more, scientists once were sure that protons are indestructible. Now they’re not so sure.

The point here is this: Even so-called scientific certainties are subject to revision. Even to drastic revision. Even to outright rejection as new discoveries extend the boundaries of human knowledge.

This is not to argue that science should be dispensed with as an essential tool of progress. It’s not to argue that the world was created in literally six work days. Nor is it to argue that humans have no ancestral connections to primates. Nor to hold out for a return to the old scientific certainty that the sun revolves around the earth.

It’s simply to note that while science progresses through collegial efforts, it does not move from A to B to C by a show of hands or a voice vote.

Yet there’s routinely the equivalent of a show of hands or a voice vote to enforce belief in a certain, orthodox view of global warming or climate change.

There was a show of hands — or bodies — on the recent “Earth Day” as hundreds of thousands turned out for demonstrations showing their fealty to the belief that human-generated emissions — especially by reckless, selfish, no-damn-good Amerika — are causing cataclysmic “climate change,” are bringing on global-warming Armageddon.

It’s a good bet that most of these demonstrators were college-educated folks who adhere strictly to a secularist outlook. Except —except — for global warming.

When it comes to global warming, they are not unlike the millenarians of yesteryear who camped out on their rooftops in anticipation of the imminent Second Coming.

It was in fact a scientist, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaver, who first dubbed global-warming alarmism a “new religion.”

The new religion, not unlike the traditional ones, demands of its flock that certain “truths” be accepted on faith. Any contrary doubts must be banished from the mind.

According to the new faith, the fast-approaching end is nigh. And as in all religions, sacrifice will be required if humankind is to avoid the literal hellfire of an overheated globe, Sacrifice such as:

• “Sustainable energy,” which is to say, more costly energy and less of it.

Not coincidentally, all of this sacrifice just so happens to coincide with the political agenda of the badgering, finger-wagging, hard-core left.

And that’s just the beginning of the sacrifice global-warming alarmism demands.

Its carbon-fuel restrictions demand of Third World nations yet more years of stunted economic growth of the kind that keeps hundreds of millions scrounging for survival at a bare subsistence level.

And the new regime of carbon-fuel restrictions threatens to hobble American and European economies, thereby impeding funds for breakthrough energy research and development.

As any religion can tell you, it’s not easy keeping the faith.

There’s the constant need to enforce orthodoxy. To suppress heretics. Never a moment’s rest.

The Church of AGW — Anthropogenic Global Warming — must react quickly and aggressively to squelch doubts planted by pesky skeptics. Pesky skeptics like Gernot Patzel, PhD, an Austrian scientist whose scholarly credentials belie his contrarian views, which are angrily condemned by climate orthodoxy. He spreads doubt by going around voicing blasphemous thoughts.

“Over the last 10,000 years,” he says, “it has been warmer than today 65 percent of the time.”

Off to the dungeon with this heretic!

If there’s always been climate change long before such environmental afflictions as SUVs, power plants and Republicans, then who’s to say how much of today’s warming is due to human activities and how much due to various natural phenomena which are known to influence climate —- oceanic, solar and atmospheric factors, for example?

Among today’s progressive intelligentsia, there’s an equivalent of the Vatican’s Congregation Pro Doctrina Fidel — a conclave of political and media activists dedicated to defending the Church of AGW’s doctrines. They’re ever alert for heresy.

Skeptics are denounced in the nastiest ad hominem terms.

They’re portrayed as in thrall to Exxon or other carbon-fuel Beelzebubs. Or worse, as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

It’s all “in bonum publicum” — in the public good — as the Inquisition was once declared to be.

In the Church of AGW, it’s a bedrock article of faith that human activity is generating catastrophic amounts of carbon dioxide, a lethal, planet-warming “greenhouse gas.”

The new church directs you to ignore the fact that carbon dioxide is essential to planetary life; that human exhalation as well as Yukons produce it; that more of it is manufactured by microbes and decomposition than by satanic Big Oil.

You are also admonished to ignore heretics like Thomas Koonin, MIT PhD, computational physicist, former science adviser to President Obama. This wolf in sheep’s clothing has taken to going around spreading doctrinal iniquity.

“Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate,” says he, “they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole.,” And he goes on:

“For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1 to 2 percent. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.”

Then Koonin compounds his heresy by adding: “We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy.”

Lay out the torture tools for this heretic!

You must — absolutely must — believe in catastrophic, human-created global warming. It’s the new faith’s equivalent of the Nicene Creed. Besides, “97 percent” of scientists believe it, so how could you dare not to?.

The “97 percent” figure is shouted from ten thousand Church of AGW pulpits. Deacon Barack Obama shouted it out himself, countless times, with the media shouting back, “Amen!”.

Even if the figure were accurate, it would be a logical fallacy — an argumentum ad populum — to cite it as “proof” of catastrophic, human-created climate change. But the figure in fact is not accurate. It belongs in the category of urban myth.

The “97 percent” traces back to a group of AGW church fathers headed by Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland. Cook and his colleagues sifted through 11,000 summaries of scientific papers on climate, sorting them according to their views, pro or con, whether humans are to blame for global warming.

The researchers ignored the key question of whether, according to the papers, human emissions are a minor factor, a moderate factor or a disastrously major factor in global warming.

Doesn’t matter, though. Because Cook and crew reported that most of the papers — 66.4 percent — expressed no view regarding the human role one way or the other. So, it takes a little alchemy and necromancy, with some numerology thrown in, to get a “97 percent” figure out of that survey.

Despite the best efforts of the modern-day inquisitional forces, skeptics — heretics — keep popping up all over, like the Cathards and Waldensians, the Hussites and the Boguines who once bedeviled the Vatican.

Although they’re ostracized from the news, the skeptics remain a lurking presence. Those who’ve questioned the “science” of global-warning hysteria, who doubt the hyperventilating claims that Antarctica is about to melt and the globe to turn into Death Valley, include impressively credentialed heretics.